There was speculation last month that Papa Roach might be working on the follow-up to last year's Crooked Teeth LP. Now, in a new interview, frontman Jacoby Shaddix has confirmed the band has already written and recorded an album's worth of material!

Shaddix tells the Morning Moose show that Papa Roach were scheduled to go on tour with Of Mice & Men right after finishing Crooked Teeth, but when that outfit's singer Austin Carlile had health issues and eventually stepped away from the group, they decided to start working on new music.

"Instead of going out on tour, we were, like, 'Let's just go back in the studio and start writing,'" Shaddix says in the interview which can be heard below. "So we started our first sessions for this album we're working on early last year, and then we went and toured on Crooked Teeth, and then we came back and jumped in the studio June and July of this year with all fresh ideas. We have, like, 13 or 14 songs written and recorded, and we feel we have a lot of really great material."

Calling Crooked Teeth a "reintroduction of who P. Roach is," Shaddix says the new music is one more example of the band's evolution, one he was worried at first fans might not understand.

"It's a little frightening in a sense at times - like, 'Oh, man. Are people gonna get it?'" he says. "But then we still have the core sound of the band on the record as well. There's a few songs that we're challenging our fans, like, 'Hey, are you gonna come down this road with us?' And the material we're writing we just feel is just great — it's so inspiring and just unique and different and rocking and anthemic and passionate. It's, like, undeniable. I feel like when we wrote the album Getting Away With Murder [2004], it was a pretty bold evolution for the band, especially with a song like "Scars" at the time for our band. Now when you think of "Scars" and Papa Roach, that's like the norm; that's who we are. So I'd say the evolution is comparable to that."

Crooked Teeth debuted at No. 20 on the Billboard Top 200 chart, selling 23,000 total units, with 18,000 being from traditional sales. Five singles were released, including the radio hits "Help" and "Born for Greatness." Earlier this year, we went in-depth with an editorial on how the band distanced themselves from the nü-metal movement they were initially a big part of, surviving a few missteps and returning stronger than ever.